What Does The Spilled Wine Symbolize In A Tale Of Two Cities

Implied in the insurgents’ cry for freedom was an ambition to escape the bottommost class from the higher classes, especially economically. Therefore, the Third Estate became an easy target for insurgents to arouse rebellions. Despite anticipated hopes, the French Revolution failed to mitigate the financial crisis, but perhaps aggravated the situation with bloodshed. The imagery throughout A Tale of Two Cities reveals the unconcealable tendency toward violence and despair amongst the commons. In a suburb of Saint-Antoine, wine from a broken cask “stained many hands and faces” and a witty observer writes “BLOOD” on a wall with the wine (Dickens 32). Spilled wine reveals the dual symbolism of the spoiling a well-contained establishment, and as
The violence stimulated by the social change failed to curtail even after the French hierarchy collapsed. For example, the revolutionary fervor turned people into “savage creatures [who were] human only in nature” (Orczy 3). French peasants enjoyed daily execution of aristocrats who attempted to flee the country. In The Scarlet Pimpernel, the West Barricade was the most infamous gate for the English nobles to escape from France. Catching escaping nobles at the scene and humiliating them until the guillotine were a crude highlight for ordinary citizens, who now became inhuman in thirst for noble's blood. Even in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens uses poetic diction with the sonorous reverberation of the wheels on the cobblestones and the wine/blood metaphor to echo the revolutionary-enthusiastic activities of the Defarges, the bloodthirsty dispensers of wine (Raguet). As insurgents increasingly concentrate on punishing the aristocrats for the past misdeeds, the revolution no longer draw on the transformation towards equality. At the same time, the rebellion’s lost ideology of human rights and equality extending to both nobility and proletariat ended with the corruption it tried to